Hi everyone! I have a daughter who wants apply to many of the prestigious boarding schools in the US as a 9th grade student. She will take her SSAT and TOEFL next month -she has not prepared way too much as we had some problems with finding a tutor, but now she will start studying really hard- and has to score really high. I just wanted to know if she has to score the same SSAT score (high 80s) as the native students or no? Also, if you recommend any online tutoring places for the TOEFL, I would love to hear about them. Thanks a lot.
Hi @highschoolmother
I don’t know about the TOEFL (but I am sure someone else will chime in 
), but I just wanted to say that there is no ‘magic SSAT score’ that ‘native’ students need to score in order to apply… If you look through CC, especially on stats of applicants you will see that there are many applicants who were accepted, even when their SSAT score was below the avg SSAT of the school… Same goes for international students, SSAT is a small part of the application… Certainly, a good score will only help you, but a below average score is not going to put you out of the running… Good Luck to highschoolkid 
:-bd
Each school will have its own level of tolerability on the SSAT range. For the top tier (TSAO schools), generally a score > mid 80th percentile is what they are looking for. Getting marginally higher than 80th percentile won’t necessarily help. But being lower than a school’s target range will definitely hurt. The schools will sometimes give some consideration for URMs, big donors, athletes, etc.
For international students, the bar is often higher. The reason is that there are lots of internationals willing to pay in full. These students tend to have pretty high scores. Plenty of students with 99th percentile SSAT scores to choose from.
TOEFL depends on the country you are coming from. If your child is enrolled in an international (english medium) school then the TOEFL score isn’t closely looked at. However if your child is from a country where English is not widely spoken, then the scores will be scrutinized.
As mentioned upthread, international students are not held to a lower standard just because they are international. If anything, they are held to a higher standard.
More to the point, the language of instruction is English. All schools without an ESL program will not accept an applicant who will be unable to hit the ground running in English.